Top Pokémon pros organise finger-wagging protest at badly-run Pokémon tournament, so the organisers just up and disqualify them

pcgamer.com:

The official tournament circuit for competitive play in Pokémon is the Video Game Championships (VGC), established in 2009, which in different territories is managed by different groups. At the recent Korean Pokemon Trainers Cup Finals some players, upset at what they saw as mismanagement generally and in particular a poor tournament format, organised a protest during a dead rubber match: All would use Pokémon equipped with Metronome, a command that chooses almost any move in the game at random, and just spam Metronome through the match.

This would obviously lead to some bizarre matchups, and the cherry on the cake as far as the pros were concerned is the in-game text for Metronome: Pokémon wag their fingers back-and-forth to summon the move.

The tournament organisers did not see the funny side. VGC player and Team Korea Manager Nash was disqualified alongside four other players, and later took to social media to explain what was behind the protest and the disqualification.

I'm not going to get into the weeds of VGC rules and tournament formats, except to say that Pokémon Korea chose a qualifying format that involves best-of-one matches that has proven incredibly unpopular among competitive players. It also recently cancelled the results of a qualifying tournament, and as a sop to those who had done well offered a bye in the first round next year: Essentially confirming that the same hated format would remain. In addition to this the Korean scene has had a difficult time post-pandemic in returning to live events.

«No IRL events, constant problems in tour system, disregarding younger divisions, absurd compensations for the problems they caused,» said Nash. «But the real problem behind all this is that they show absolute